40,000 Facebook Users Fall for Ikea Gift Card Scam

Last week, a fake $500 Whole Foods coupon scam was going around Facebook, and now nearly 40,000 users have fallen for an Ikea gift card scam on the site. The sad part is that an Ikea scam already happened in Mar 2010.
PC World is reporting that nearly 40,000 Facebook users signed up for a $1,000 Ikea gift card offer early today, which was unfortunately fake. The scam offer, like many others, pulls people into a Facebook Fan Page, then directs them to click on a link to sign up. In addition, users are told that they have to fill out two “offers” from companies — a popular and legitimate way on Facebook to give away freebie items and services. In this case, the companies that users are supposedly filling out offers with are Netflix and CreditReport.com.

Naturally, by making the gift card offer seem like it’s available for a limited time, scammers are going to lure some small percentage of over 400M Facebook users into websites with innocent-seeming domain names, and successfully fill out sensitive personal information. Besides tricking people to reveal such information, possibly for identity theft purposes, a common finish for such scams is to install viruses or other malware on their computers.

Today’s Ikea gift card scam follows another Ikea scam in March that apparently had 70,000 victims. In the PC World article, a Facebook spokesperson suggested that they’re working on a way to automatically remove Fan Pages that host such scams. Three Fan Pages have already appeared warning other Facebook users not to join the offending Page, which appears to have been removed. The site Ikea Fans has more on the scams.

Did you or someone you know fall for the Whole Foods or Ikea scams? If you’re concerned that an offer you’ve seen online, whether at Facebook or elsewhere, is legitimate, check out Scambusters for the latest info. (Warning: annoying popup on Scambusters site.)